when did the internet become less human?š¹
and what it has to do with what we feel
You have to write this way if you want to go viral. You have to do this if you want to grow. Post at this hour, hook them in the first line, and give them a reason to stay. The phrasing changes depending on who is saying it, but the instruction underneath is always the same: ādo not make the thing you want to make, make the thing that works.ā
And this is happening at the same time that everyone is telling us to be ourselves. You must be authentic, you must do it your way, and you must remember that ātaste is the moatā. I donāt think we have ever talked about individuality more than we do now, and at the same time, I donāt think we have ever been more obedient to a set of rules none of us wrote. I do not think most people are lying when they say be yourself, but I simply cannot work out how we are supposed to be ourselves in the things we make while we are still holding each thing up against what the algorithm wants from us before we even start making it.
The early internet, the one I am old enough to be a little nostalgic for, felt more human than this. It truly felt like people were in it. I started to believe that the internet became less human when we stopped posting what we felt and started posting what we thought would work.
I am not saying that we were never posting something for someone on the other side of the screen we were hoping to reach, but I know that we were doing it much less than we are doing now. We cared more about curating our own expression online than allowing someone or something else to curate it for us, which is what is happening today. The person and the algorithm behind the screen do not want the same things for us. One wants the human side of things, while the other just wants to be fed. And weāve been taught to want to please the latter more, but it can and will never be pleased.
And now I find myself getting back to taste, which is something I said I am never going to talk about again, but here I am. Taste is the thing weāve been told will save us. Taste is the last human advantage, the part of us that still chooses, the only thing that cannot be automated. It is inherently ours. And I want to believe that. But I cannot stop asking how much of my taste is still mine. I canāt remember exactly when I started to care more about how a thing performed than about my own personal expression, and this is exactly why I believe that Iāve unconsciously spent years training myself to feel a small spark of yes every time something looked like it would perform. And thus my taste is no longer mine, but what something else thinks others will like. I was looking at taste as being a cure, but I think most of it is just the same sickness, but wearing nicer clothes.
I keep saying that one of the reasons why everything is so fleeting now is because most of the things we create and consume are weightless, but at the same time, itās a weightless thing that holds so much value in our lives. The metrics we care so much about measure nothing that actually matters, but at the same time, these same numbers that mean nothing are also the ones that decide who gets seen. They are weightless, and they are everything at the same time. You can stop caring about them and still see how a thing you loved was read by no one, while something you made carelessly travels further than you ever wanted it to go. The game is fake, but it also decides who āeatsā. Both of these are true. And I have done all of it.
I have sat with a way I actually wanted to say something and eventually set it aside because I already knew it would go nowhere, and I focused on the other way instead, which I tried to shape for the feed, and told myself it was the same thing, but it wasnāt. Iāve found myself refreshing a post so many times, watching a number that was not moving, and feeling something close to grief over it, which is an insane thing to feel if you ask me. What I am still realizing about this game is that even if I win, I will be left empty in a particular way that I cannot fully articulate because I donāt fully understand it. I would say āyet,ā but I donāt think I ever will understand it, simply because I want to pull back from these things even more than I am doing now.
Part of what pulls me back is a handful of people who are still doing the other thing, which is essentially posting and making things that no āgrowthā advice would ever have told them to make. These are the threads I want to keep following, and I follow them because I think they are one of the things that remain human when everything else is being replaced. The reason behind making something is one of the last, if not the last, human things a machine cannot copy, and I think that if we paid a little more attention than we do now, we could feel its presence or its absence almost instantly.
The other part is a thing I have understood more slowly. Since I started getting closer to God, I have begun to see how fleeting all of this is, and how much of myself I had been pouring into something that was never able to receive it. The emptiness I could not explain earlier makes a little more sense to me now, because I think it was the honest thing to feel all along. You cannot be filled by something that does not see you, and for years, I kept offering myself to a thing that cannot be pleased and does not care to be, and then wondering why I felt so hollow even after winning. I am not saying this to preach anything, and I do not fully have the words for it. I only know that getting closer to Him changed the light I see all of this in, and once that light changed, the game looked smaller than it ever had.
I am not going to start a movement, or log off (though I am more logged off than ever), or fix the internet, because I do not think it gets fixed from above, and I donāt think it gets fixed all at once. It is too big for that. But I do think that the change comes in the moments before I post something, when I am reflecting on what I actually feel and what I have learned will work. I think this gap is the place where these two can be told apart. I also think itās the one where the internet went cold, and at the same time, the only place I have ever found where it gets warm again.
This gap is something I would love for more people to be aware of, because it is only by being inside it that we can choose the version that is more human, in the moment we feel ourselves about to reach for the version that works. Itās one way to realize one of the things that remains human when everything is being replaced.š¹